ETHICAL DATIVE, PSEUDO-EXPLETIVE NEGATION, AND MIRATIVE GO IN ITALIAN. A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF STACKABLE MARKERS OF MIRATIVITY

The linguistic strategies to express the unprepared mind of the speaker towards the events narrated, which can convey a sense of surprise, astonishment, wonder, regret, or scandal, are referred to in the literature as “miratives” (DeLancey 1997). Cross-linguistically, mirative strategies can be realized via a number of linguistic means besides mere intonation. As regards Italo-Romance, Spoken Italian seems to be able to resort to the highest number of mirative markers, which are generally stackable without yielding any redundancy. These are: i) different types of Ethical Datives, ii) the expletive negation within a rhetorical question, iii) the functional verb andare ‘go’ in some verbal periphrases. In this paper we discuss the syntactic properties of these mirative markers and account for their ability to cooccur in one and the same sentence.